Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Meet the commenters: 'Blahedo'

Resides: Farmville, VA (yes, in Virginia, there is a Farmville); previously Galesburg, IL for eight years.

Family: My parents and sister live in Palatine (where I grew up and visit often); I have a lot of extended family scattered mostly around the north side and the north and northwest suburbs.

Political philosophy: Strongly left; I describe myself as progressive, green, or socialist, depending on the context. When I hear people complain that we should let people band together to solve a problem "instead" of "letting" the government help, I'm boggled, because I see the government precisely as our way of collectively banding together to solve problems. The Reaganite concept that the government is inherently a problem and should be a last resort is a pernicious and toxic idea. (I also have a minor libertarian streak I inherit from my dad, but that shows up more in how I want the government to accomplish desired goals rather then whether it should act at all.)

Hobbies: I enjoy doing and trying lots of different things, but I'd say I enjoy "advanced amateur" status in theatre (both onstage and backstage), knitting, and ballroom dancing.

These days I'm recommending: Buy actual subscriptions to the content creators you value. I enjoy reading stuff online for free, too, but I bought a subscription to the Atlantic when it dawned on me that I kept reading their articles online, and it was good, and I wanted them to keep producing it. Ditto the Tribune "plus" stuff.

Other sites I visit regularly: BBC and Al Jazeera for general news (plus the Trib, of course); Hacker News, GinAndTacos, and Language Log for techie, political, and linguistic commentary respectively; a host of webcomics I won't list here; and Sporcle and Kongregate for clever and/or mindless little games when I need some down time.

Your posts are always strong, sensible, and moderately left of center.

There is a concept in psychology – “the presentation of one’s everyday self.” The assumption is that every aspect of your appearance has meaning for you and is what you want to project to others.

I have taken hundreds of depositions which are essentially interrogations. (No torture involved, however.) As part of the process I am continuously assessing the deponent – to see how best he or she can be probed.

I would love to decode you and then see whether you agree or disagree. I am just really surprised as to how “off” I was about your appearance. I assume, however, that you would find that to be a waste of your time.

Note that I like diversity and do not want everyone to look the same. Thus I have absolutely no gripe with you.

Pleased to meet another self-described "strongly left" sometimes "socialist". I'm curious how it is that such a far leftist is into the Atlantic. It's pretty much Obama-type centrist, if not outright Obama-centric.

And I'll second JerryB that you look nothing like I had you pictured - I don't think I've been as surprised by any other pictures.

Welcome! My niece just graduated from Farmville (in December). The name always makes me laugh. The Virginia university system seems top-notch, with many great schools (my brother -- the afore-mentioned niece's dad, is a reference librarian at Mary Washington).

Nice to meet you, Professor. Your comments always hit the mark; I just wish you could comment more often. Looking at your picture, the first thought that came to mind...Did this guy step off a Fleetwood Mac album cover circa 1975?

Hi, blahedo! Nice to meet you! Like Dienne, glad to see someone else on "our side", and I also wish you would comment more often. You express what I often want to say (in your political philosophy) but somehow don't quite get it right.

@Zorn: I put mine in the comments to MCN's profile with an explanation.

@Blah: I was being serious. Looks like you're living the life.

ZORN REPLY -- So you did! It was so completely uninformative I glazed right past it. I'll repost it here and if you want to do one that's a bit less snarky and bit more usefully compllere I'll be happy to give it its own. Otherwise you can follow the lead of several others and politely decline.

LEXI

Political Philosophy: Quit your whining, leave me alone, and take care of yourself.

Age: Younger than you old f@rts :)

Favorite SW Restaurants: Chelsea’s Kitchen, Ted’s.

Favorite Hike: Echo Canyon.

Occupation: BigWig

Hobbies: Gardening. But don’t stereotype. I also like building things.

Barry3: Hacker News is free and many (most?) of its links are not super-technical, but news about the state of technology or just generally geeky stuff. Check it out!

JerryB: "Decode" me... sounds intriguing. Drop me a line!

JerryB, Dienne: Now I'm curious what you _thought_ I'd look like. ;)

Beth: What an incredibly small world. Longwood isn't that large a school and with something like 95% of its students coming from in-state, it's not well known outside the area. But yes, I love how they run their state university system here; very different from the Illinois style and, I think, more accommodating of different students wanting/needing different things out of their university.

Mick Taylor: Sure, I didn't make it down to Abingdon that often but it wasn't that far and they're covered by the Galesburg paper. A lot of the little towns down that way are really nice (as is Galesburg itself---I certainly wouldn't have left if my job hadn't carried me elsewhere!)

MOPerina: Probably not---I was a Viator kid. ;)

GJO'L: Yeah, I think I'd have trouble passing as a real Latino (too much German and Irish in my face, I think, though my sister does a much better job, oddly enough), but honorary works. :) I'm curious, though: what made you think I was Latino?

Blahedo, nice to meet you. I've always enjoyed your comments as an ally on the left - you've got a way of getting important points across very concisely and wittily. It's funny, you've always reminded me of someone, and now that I know you're a computer science professor, I realize it was a couple of the tech guys I worked with at my first dot-com job out of college. Good guys with a sense of humor and that vaguely libertarian undercurrent that seems common in the tech world.

Well, you've previously told us your first name is Don and that you're a college professor (although I didn't know it was computer science). The only people named Don that I know are over 50. That and the college professor thing, I pictured you pretty old, balding and wearing tweed suits.

Interesting profile, blahedo. I think you make a good point about buying subscriptions to the publications that matter to you. (Not that I'm very consistent in actually doing so. Ahem.) For me, with the exception of finding out that MOPerina, who I assumed was about a 52-year-old man, looked like Goldie Hawn, your picture showing up next to your name is the biggest surprise of this project. Given that I figured that you were about 52, yourself. (Uh, I realize this says more about my preconceptions than anything else.) Like several other folks, I've always enjoyed your comments and perspective and have wished that you'd comment more often.

Ah, that makes sense. It's true---the name "Don" was really common in WWII and shortly thereafter, and a lot rarer in my generation. Both my parents have brothers named Don (and no other siblings!), so I guess that makes it a family name. It's actually a nice compromise: I was always the only "Don" in my class, and usually in my whole extended social group, but because the name was in common circulation in the older generation nobody ever did a double-take or found it confusing or hard to spell. I tell my friends who are having kids that this is a great policy and that they should name their kids something like "Lisa" or "Brian", but none of them have taken me up on it. :)

"Blahedo" was actually my user account when I was in college---they formed them as the first five of your last name and first two of your first name. I stuck with it because it's pronounceable on sight and yet still manages to be (as far as I can tell) a unique identifier. I have never run into anyone else on the entire internet that uses it! My last name, "Blaheta", is also rare (less than a dozen in the US, all close relatives of mine) but somewhat more common in Germany and the Czech Republic. (And, although the name isn't remotely Spanish, I do sometimes point out that it rhymes with "fajita", so maybe that counts for something....)

@Eric: I politely decline offering up any more specific information. Since my views often stray from the politically correct I wish to avoid awaking one day to a mob of angry protestors occupying my front sidewalk.

ZORN REPLY -- Though this kind of self-inflated paranoia is not exclusive to the right, it seems to have a nice warm home there. No one on this board -- not even me -- has ever been harassed in this way or even hassled at all (snipy comments notwithstanding). Yet you lurk and shoot spitballs, trembling with fear.

Nice to meet you, Don! I understand your "buying subscriptions" suggestion, even though I haven't done a great job of it. I guess I fall somewhere between "paying for everything" and "paying for nothing." Consider music. I've never downloaded anything illegally, but it's also been years since I've bought an album on vinyl, in iTunes, or on CD. Instead, I happily maintain a Rhapsody subscription, which funnels a few pennies to the artists I listen to and inspires me to see the occasional live show.

@Eric: And BTW, have you noticed most of your commenters, left and right, don't post their real names and home towns?

I continue to be amused that partisans refuse to see the exact same behavior they condemn from people on their own side. In their mind the other side is always worse.

PS: I don't remember Republicans showing up to protest on the lawns of CEOs, as Dems have done.

ZORN REPLY -- The contributors to this feature have managed to tell us quite a bit about themselves while still in most cases retaining some anonymity or privacy. Your "contribution" to this feature was so close to content free as to be useless. Though I guess if the point was to get to know a little bit more about you, we did that.

@MCN "How did a good Viator kid turn out to be such a lefty? Was it you got contaminerated at Brown?"

Hard to say, although among my high school friends that I'm still in contact with, there's a reasonably wide mix of political views, both left and right. Growing up, my experience with Catholics "on the ground" (i.e. not including bishops and hierarchy), and especially with ordered priests (Viatorians at St. Viator, Franciscans at Quincy University, where I did my undergrad) has been that they have an outlook more in line with the political priorities of the left than the right, though of course that's a mix as well.

Or maybe I just wasn't a "good" Viator kid? High school was when I stopped regularly going to church, before starting up again during grad school; my time at Brown was arguably the most religious period of my life, when I started going to church again, got confirmed, and was much more consciously Catholic than I had been growing up. It's true that a lot of my political views were still being formed when I was at Brown, but I'd say they were more informed by my Catholicism than in spite of it.

"The thought of an irate banjo player waiting for me in the dark ally outside my home makes me tremble with fear."

@lexi:

It's almost certain that the person will be a white, middle class, young male with a semiautomatic rifle with a high capacity magazine, carrying two or three semiautomatic handguns with extra capacity magazines in each of them, and several more extra capacity magazines stuffed in his pockets.

Terry McG; While such suburban schools as St. Joseph, Providence, and Bishop McNamara are members of the Catholic League, Marist, St. Viator, and former Catholic League member St. Patrick (still in Chicago) are members of the East Suburban Catholic League, which apparently is neither all suburban or all eastern, although all the schools we know are still Catholic (but maybe not by MCN's standards).

Robert Pruter, thanks for the clarification. I was just poking fun because in the 60s/70s, we Chicago Catholic Leaguers, not then being part of the IHSA, thought of ourselves as more elite. Have no pity, we want city...

It was all for the better that the Chicago Catholic League joined the IHSA, which finally put an end to sixty years of a segregated system. The Catholic schools set up their separate league in the fall of 1912, when they discovered their applications for membership in the Cook County League (the preceding league before the Chicago Public School League) were being ignored. St. Philip was already in the league, and the Cook County League probably felt that St. Philip met their quota for Catholic schools. Well, the Catholic schools could smell more than a hint of anti-Catholicism and set up a league round December 1912. I believe in 1972, the Chicago Catholic League was the last remaining Catholic league to join the IHSA. I know, more than you wanted to know.

Robert, the Catholic League jointed the IHSA in summer of '74. It was right before my senior year at Mendel. They agreed to join the IHSA in '73, but gave themselves 18 months to prepare. We lost our head football coach, Lou Guida, because of the move. He was hurt in college, never completed his degree, and had no teaching certificate. Since this was a requirement of coaches in the IHSA, he had to go. Was really kind of sad, he was a Catholic League legend.
We football players thought it might be cool to go "downstate", but it was kind of a shame to see the Prep Bowl diminished to also-ran status. As I'm sure you're aware, the Prep Bowl (Catholic vs. Public) drew unprecedented numbers of fans during its heyday.

Thanks for the correction on the date, I was doing it from my increasingly diminished memory. Yes, I saw the Prep Bowl prior to the Catholic League joining the IHSA, with Soldier Field mostly filled. Morgan Park was killed by St. Rita I believe.

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
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